The Committee to Save the World

By James Kwak

You know that famous Time cover featuring Rubin, Greenspan, and Summers, calling them “The Committee to Save the World”? I was reading the accompanying article, which I had never read before, and it’s an absolutely precious example of the nonsense people said at the time. Like this:

Rubin, Greenspan and Summers have outgrown ideology. Their faith is in the markets and in their own ability to analyze them. … This pragmatism is a faith that recalls nothing so much as the objectivist philosophy of the novelist and social critic Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged), which Greenspan has studied intently. During long nights at Rand’s apartment and through her articles and letters, Greenspan found in objectivism a sense that markets are an expression of the deepest truths about human nature and that, as a result, they will ultimately be correct. … They all agree that trying to defy global market forces is in the end futile. That imposes a limit on how much they will permit ideology to intrude on their actions.

I realize this is written by a journalist, not by one of the three men themselves. But could you come up with a better example of an ideology?